


Winter Words

by squeequeg



Category: Robin McKinley - Damar series
Genre: F/M, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2007, recipient:Willow Smith
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-25
Updated: 2007-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-22 01:00:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/231908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squeequeg/pseuds/squeequeg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The City is a different place during the winter rains.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Winter Words

**Author's Note:**

> (Written under a now-defunct pseud for the Yuletide 2007 challenge)  
> I'd originally meant this to just be an exploration of Corlath and Harry together after the events of The Blue Sword, but I found myself thinking more about the winter rains -- which we never see -- and how the Hillfolk adjusted to them. From there, it got a little out of control. The quote at the end only showed up after I'd written the first draft, and I realized it had been in my head the whole time, shaping the story. I hope you like it!  
> Thanks to my beta readers, minyan and sigerson, both of whom helped immeasurably.

"I think," Harry said as they crossed swords, "you need to get me angry again."

Corlath parried her stroke and slid out of the way of her cloth-wrapped blade. "From anyone but you, my heart, I would consider that a most unusual request."

"I'm serious." She said it smiling, though, and her eyes gleamed as she returned his attack.

"If you truly wish it, you have only to wait." He nodded to the colonnade to his left, where the winter rains had churned the practice field into mud. Welcome mud -- most of his Riders had not thought they would live to see the rains again -- but mud nonetheless. "I am sure you and I will have cause for a kinik fight before the rains cease."

"But that's just it." She halted in mid-attack; Corlath mistook the feint for hesitation, and the flat of her sword hit him square on his upper arm, hard enough to sting through armor and padding both. "When I was training with Mathin -- before the laprun trials -- I seemed to pick up this language easily. But now --" she pivoted away from him and ducked under his sword as smoothly as if Tsornin carried her, "-- I hear words like kinik and rasth-anan and yeliel, and I don't know what they mean."

Corlath grinned and caught her blade against his. Cloth frayed and gave way to a screech of metal on metal. "And so you'd use me to provoke your kelar into teaching you, instead of simply asking?" He let his blade slide down hers until they faced each other above crossed hilts. "A very circumspect manner of learning."

Harry returned his grin and poked him with her shield, a teasing jab rather than a proper attack.

He laughed and disengaged. "Mathin is not at fault. Nor is your Gift. These are words you would have had no reason to learn." He thought, but did not say aloud, that perhaps it was because her Gift did not care if she would still be of Damar when the rains came. Kelar might fuel great deeds; it could not compel love. "They are winter words, closer to the Old Tongue than to Hill speech, perhaps because they are only used during the rains."

Harry stepped back a pace and began to unwind the cloth from her sword. "You mean no one uses them once the sun comes out?"

"Mm. Yes and no. They don't mean the same thing under the sun, or they don't mean anything at all." He unwrapped his own sword and sheathed it, wincing at the pain from his fresh bruise. "Yeliel, that means a leak. But only one through which rain can come -- never a leak in a dish, or a bath."

"What about a leak in a tent?"

He paused a moment, then laughed. "Ah, that is another matter entirely. Eyarkuk, that means a man foolish enough to put up a tent in the rain." He paused a moment as Harry took off her helmet; even tightly braided, her hair was bright as a patch of sunlight. "Most of the words are insults or complaints. Kinik, that's unimportant, petty. Kinik fights mean nothing and go nowhere. Ethasur, that's a small room, one that will only get smaller. My father, when the rains came, would call the City an ethasur."

Harry nodded thoughtfully. "And rasth-anan?"

"That's a man too happy to see the rain. A fool." He caught the smile on her lips before she could hide it. "And where did you hear that particular word?"

"I certainly did not hear it among the Riders," she said, laughing.

"Surely no Rider would call his king a rasth-anan," he said, and kissed her.

"Surely not," she agreed, and for a time their swordplay was forgotten.

* * *

The City was a different place in winter. Eaves and tiles that seemed unnecessarily decorative in full sun demonstrated their purpose by diverting water into channels that soon ran as swift as any stream. The great cisterns behind the castle began to fill, one by one in a progression that children came to watch as one overflowed into the next. There were dances, and nights of song, and contests of poetry or chant or harmony that were no less competitive than the laprun trials or the churakak. Together Corlath and Harry whiled away firelit evenings with the tales of Aerin Dragon-Killer while the wind drove rain against the shutters; together they slept warm in each other's arms.

But there were other ways the City changed. The green lawn that separated the jeweled blue house from the castle proper had no roof to shield it, and so every passage to or from it became a mad dash through the rain over slippery paving stones. The kennels and the thotor both quickly acquired a smell of wet dog, one that would by spring permeate the entire palace. Worst of all, the rains made riding less appealing, and practice on horseback practically impossible among the wet cobbles of the City. Tsornin and Isfahel were hardly neglected, not with Harry and Corlath coming to them at least once a day, but as the rains went on their tails began to droop.

Hence the practice rooms for combat on foot -- once ballrooms and grand halls, now put to better use with floors of sand and racks of padded weapons. Hence, too, the archery practice, in which the visiting filanon had quietly established supremacy. Harry's brother, Richard (who kept his honor so close Corlath at first mistook it for disapproval), spent much of his time in those long halls. There was a rasth-anan indeed, he and Kentarre, if Corlath was reading the signs right.

As the weeks wore on, though, the practice rooms became less a place of interest and more a necessity. The City was large enough to hold many, but when every room became an ethasur, sometimes the only solution was to spend half an hour hitting someone else very hard. The hafor began to clean more often -- not because it was needed, but because the work was a distraction from any kinik complaints among them. For the same reason, a few of his Riders began to sequester themselves: Mathin, for example, took up carving the same softstone screen that he had begun two years before Corlath's father died, while Forloy created delicate silver filigree jewelry and left each piece where he finished it for a passerby to discover. Innath's gift for ribald poetry inevitably won him favor among the women of the hafor, and just as inevitably lost him their favor, as it did every year.

Narknon, for her part, acted as a cat must act and slept, usually stretched out across a doorway. It was not until Corlath tripped over her for the fifth time and cursed aloud that he realized the endless rain had finally affected him as well.

The next night, as he and Harry lay together well away from the rain-lashed windows, she asked him questions he could not answer. They were trivial things, simple questions about why the duties a king of Damar differed from, say, those of the Queen of the Outlanders. At last he was reduced to tautology. "It makes perfect sense," he said, more harshly than he'd meant to. "In the Hills, it makes sense."

Harry stiffened and sat up, away from him. Now, he thought, now there will be a kinik fight, and we will snap at each other till the night wears out, and wake up clear of all this. But instead she was silent for a long moment, and the only sound was the incessant rain outside. "It's odd," she said finally, her voice maddeningly calm. "I'd gotten so used to our time outside the City -- our time preparing for war, and recovering from it -- that I hadn't ever thought of what you do when the Northerners aren't attacking."

"Little enough," he said, but he took her meaning.

She turned to him, a shadow among shadows. "Sometimes it feels as if I don't know you, for all that I love you. I don't know -- what are we, when we're not being tossed around by our Gifts?"

 _"We aren't really much good, except as battle machines."_ His father had told him that, long ago, and until now he had not fully understood the truth of it. Some battles could not be won by holding one's beloved on a nonexistent mountaintop, and though their love had been forged in battle, there were some blades that shattered when immersed in water. For all his Gift and all his skill as a king and a warrior, this was not something he could fight against.

Abruptly he felt a rush of terror: terror that she would reconsider, that she would regret her choice of the Hills now that she saw them without the fog of kelar, that he would once again be alone and aloof from everyone. He groped blindly for her hand and clasped it in both of his own.

She smiled -- even through the dark, he could see the curve of her lips, and lay back beside him, in the crook of his arm. But that night he lay awake long, stilling his breathing to match hers, and he thought she did the same.

There was a word for what he saw, and he knew it well: dharrag, the lens of water, through which one sees one's fears magnified. Two months into the winter rains, he was still not quite far enough from the fear that she would regret her choice, not far enough that dharrag could not draw such fears out.

He overheard her talking to the Outlander Jack Dedham, who had found a room in the easternmost wing of the palace. "How do you stand it?" she demanded of him, and though her voice remained light, there was a frayed quality to it that Corlath knew well.

Dedham, who for all his Outlander ways had adapted to the City quite easily, only shrugged. "You forget I've lived with this for decades," he remarked. "And the General Mundy was a much smaller place. I could probably hold out another two months before going mad."

"But not more."

"No," he agreed, "not more." Harry did not answer, and Corlath moved on, unwilling to let her know that he had heard.

There were words he did not want her to learn, words that made clear how painful the rains could be. The ethasur, the closed rooms, were bad enough, but there were others that spoke of all the things that could drive a man mad, all the ways the color could drain out of a life as the gutters drained into the cisterns without cease, all the spikes that could be driven between lovers. Above all there was the word vrennen, which in the Old Tongue had meant scorpion.

And so as the rains dragged on and the days stayed gray, his temper wore down like leather stretched too tight, but Harry kept her composure with an almost unnatural stillness. Corlath knew those who became more silent as the rains continued, couples in which each person saved up the hurts, ready to defend against them the moment the other spoke out, like two armed cities prepared for a siege that never took place. He began to fear that she, who had kept her Gift so tightly controlled that it was unknown for years, would face the rains in the same way and thus shut him out equally.

When the fight came, it was almost a relief: Harry had gone out for a ride, taking the poorly-cobbled road that most shunned during the rains, and Corlath, angry that she'd risked herself and Tsornin for so little, had let his words bite more than they should.

The fight started out small, a few angry words exchanged on the stairs, then as they made their way further into the castle, grew larger and louder, until by the time they reached the little room over the great courtyard both were shouting. Even here, the rains had found a way in; the balcony that in summer was blinding white from the stone below now sheeted with rain, enough that a thin trail of it had escaped the gutter and trickled over the floor. Corlath, striding into the room, stepped into it and spared a moment's curse for it.

"You are being stubborn," he said over his shoulder. The trickle of water sizzled underfoot, set to boiling from the heat of his anger. "Stubborn, and a fool, and --"

"I am stubborn? Oh, please do enlighten me how I can be stubborn while you're the one being rational!" Harry flung her sodden cloak to the floor. Though the hafor should have been at hand to take her cloak, they had all fled. Corlath, still caught in his fury, did not follow the thought through to its end.

They circled each other like snarling cats, the original argument long forgotten."I have not half the stubbornness of a mad Outlander," Corlath said, "in fact, I think you must have learned it in your cradle, to have perfected it so! Is it something they teach all Outlanders, to have heads of wood and the sense of a stunned ootag? Small wonder we kept you and yours out of the Hills."

Harry, who had frozen at the word _Outlander_ , caught her breath, then stopped dead. "No," she said, again so calm it was infuriating, all of her anger retreating behind a wall colder than any stone of the City. "You can throw that in my face, but I will not let you bait me."

"No? Why not? For the love of the Seven Perfect Gods, woman, are you inhuman? _Why not?_ " He stopped by a small stone table and struck it so hard his hand hurt. An enameled copper vase on the table rocked from the blow. "Those of the Hills always fight during the rains! Are you not of the Hills? Three months have passed, and you -- do you think to prove yourself a true Outlander among savages --" he used the Outlander word for savages, and her eyes flared at the sound of it, "-- by holding yourself aloof from us?"

"You --" Harry choked on her words, her fists clenched, eyes blazing as bright as he knew his must be. "You bullying, thickheaded -- how could you even begin to think --"

Vrennen, he thought, the word cutting like a blade through his anger and leaving him chilled. The scorpion word, that stings the speaker as much as the spoken to. I have fallen prey to the vrennen, and I have lost her. I am a fool.

What she meant to say he never learned. Harry drew breath to curse him, and with a sound like the shattering of a thousand eggs, the copper vase between them crumpled as if gripped in a massive hand. Enamel splinters sprayed across the table and pattered onto the floor.

Corlath jerked away, staring at the wreck of metal. He had rarely lost control over his anger to such a degree -- and had not now, he realized. Automatically, he looked up at Harry, whose face had gone gray-pale under the sun's brown. If he had not lost control in so long, how long must it have been for her, whose control had held all through her childhood and into adulthood?

He crossed the floor in a few quick strides and caught her in his arms, holding her tight as a shudder ran through her. "I'm a fool," he said, "a fool. Harimad-sol, Harry, please," and more, the words meaning less than the embrace.

She drew a shaking breath that was almost a sob and thumped him with a loosely curled fist. "Did you really think -- Corlath, how could you ever believe I would regret the Hills? I was -- I'd been trying to keep my temper for months, not just with you but with everyone, just so no one would think I'd regretted my choice. I couldn't bear it if you'd --"

"It's winter," he said. "We have to lose our tempers in the winter, just so we can last till spring. The rains do that. Beloved, nothing said during the rains lasts. It's only the things that don't get said, that poison us after the sun comes out."

Her chest hitched against him, and she thumped him again, right on the faded bruise. "I miss my Damarian wilds. They're all, all wet, and I can't --"

"They're still there." He touched her chin, and though she batted his hand away, there was no anger in it, only weariness. "They are there, and I am here, with you. I am sorry."

"And you're an idiot."

"I am indeed an idiot, and I crave forgiveness." He kissed her hair. "But I am no less glad of your Gift, if it means I can be brought to realize that."

For a moment there was no sound save the endless rain outside. Harry sighed and leaned against him, and he smiled into her sun-yellow hair. "I now understand," he said lightly, "how you could have reached adulthood with no knowledge of kelar. You had no rains to force the kindling anger out of you."

Harry made a small noise and pulled back away from him, grinning. "That's where you're wrong. They had plenty of rain, rain and snow and sleet all together, and all the year round."

Though it was no surprise to him -- he knew some of the Outlanders' home country, for much the same reason as he knew their language -- he still could not mask the momentary flinch at the thought of year-round rains. "I cannot imagine how you survived," he said, only half joking.

"Easy," Harry said. "We got wet." And in one quick movement, she stepped backwards onto the balcony, dragging him with her.

The rain hit Corlath in the face like a sheet, and he gasped, water streaming through his hair. For a moment the merry gleam in Harry's eyes dimmed, and he could see her wonder if perhaps she had taken the joke too far, if perhaps the kinik fight would resume. And then Corlath laughed, loud enough that the few scurrying figures in the courtyard looked up for a moment. Rasth-anan, he thought, rasth-anan, a man too besotted to see the rain. He pulled her close under the eaves, where the rain poured down onto both their heads, and kissed her full on the mouth.

They made love just inside, peeling out of their sodden clothing, and for all Harry's boasts about rain she yelped and wriggled away when he shook his head and showered her with droplets from his damp hair. Afterwards, after donning the dry clothing left just outside the door by the tactful hafor, Harry picked up the mangled vase and set it between them. Together they repaired it, glaring golden by turns, and though the glaze remained cracked in many places, it was recognizably a vase when they were done.

Harry took the vase in her hands and sat unspeaking for a moment. "Like Gonturan," she murmured.

"Mm?" Corlath massaged his temples, trying to bring the world back into focus. "You do not mean the vase, I think."

"No -- the words. Winter words. They're old, they're only brought out rarely -- like a family's good crystal, but much more important."

"In times of need," Corlath said, and slid his arms around her.

"And trying times," she agreed.

Harry brought the vase to her quarters that night and set it by the fountain, its crazed enamel somehow a counterpoint to the thousands of blue stones that tiled the walls. And though the kelar had left them both with headaches, they made love again, wordlessly this time.

* * *

When he woke in the dark of the jeweled blue room, Harry murmuring in her sleep beside him, he could already feel the change in the air. Across the City, other Hillfolk were waking, sensing the same thing he sensed, and smiling as they rolled over and went back to sleep. But he remained awake, listening to the plash of the fountain.

He sat up, then leaned over Harry. "Beloved," he whispered, his breath stirring the fine hair beside her ear. "Rise. I have something to show you."

She smiled, mumbled something, then blinked herself awake. Had he been wakened with as little explanation, he might have been angry enough to begin another kinik fight. But Harry shrugged into the sleeves of her robe -- very briefly he remembered the discarded garment she wore when he stole her from the big house in Ihistan -- and smiled, her teeth flashing in the dimness. "Well? Narknon will steal our bed, you know, and I had those covers nicely arranged."

He led her out into the streets of the City. Already his skin prickled with the awareness of drier air, and after a few steps, Harry noticed the same change. She glanced at him, but he gestured for silence and led her further on, down to the gates of their City, to the great plain.

The plain was only barely green -- it would take full sunlight to draw the great riot of growth out from between the stones -- but the violet morning sky touched with stars promised sun. A faint haze hung over the ground, of things waiting to grow, poised like a horse before a race.

When he was very small, Corlath had believed he could hear the ground waiting to grow; when he grew older and struggled through the headaches and fits of kelar, he knew that to be no idle fancy. And now he could see that Harry, too, heard that same tension in the earth, and understood it. Her eyes glittered with tears and a brightness beyond the tears.

"This is your kingdom, queen of Damar," he said. "All of this is yours, as am I."

He placed her hand over his heart, scarred palm over scarred palm, and for a moment she said nothing. Then she brought up her other hand, the unmarked one, and drew him to her.

And there is a word for this too, but it is not a winter word, nor is it even spoken.

* * *

Song of Solomon 2:10-11: _My beloved spake, and said unto me: Rise up, my fair one, and come away. For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone._

  



End file.
